Skip to main content

Bibliophile reviews Volga, Volga: A voyage down the great river (travel)

Author: Lesley Chamberlain
Year published: 1996
Genre: Travelogue

Chamberlain, a former reporter, returns to post-Communist Russia to travel down the Volga. She writes of her journey, people she meets and places she visits, and enriches the travelogue with history, literature and legends connected with the river.

Review: The author obviously has a rather uneasy relationship with Russia and her people. Even though she speaks the language, she finds it hard to understand them: their thinking processes are alien to her and she finds their behaviour contradictory, but she loves the country and its literature and searches for understanding through literary texts, history, legends and the landscape. Trying to understand and analyse the Russian soul proves to be harder than she expected, and she ends up alienated and suffering from culture shock.
The writing is straightforward, journalistic and matter of fact, with an occasional poetic burst.

Rating: An uneasy voyage down one of the world’s famous rivers, among people who haven’t quite come to terms with the end of Communism. 3+ stars.
Labels:

Comments

Maxine Clarke said…
Glad to see you are back reading ;-)
April 13, 2006 5:57 pm
Bibliophile said…
Thank you. The change of genre helped a lot.
April 14, 2006 10:45 am
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down
Post a Comment
Read more

Icelandic folk-tale: The Devil Takes a Wife

Stories of people who have made a deal with and then beaten the devil exist all over Christendom and even in literature. Here is a typical one: O nce upon a time there were a mother and daughter who lived together. They were rich and the daughter was considered a great catch and had many suitors, but she accepted no-one and it was the opinion of many that she intended to stay celebrate and serve God, being a very devout  woman. The devil didn’t like this at all and took on the form of a young man and proposed to the girl, intending to seduce her over to his side little by little. He insinuated himself into her good graces and charmed her so thoroughly that she accepted his suit and they were betrothed and eventually married. But when the time came for him to enter the marriage bed the girl was so pure and innocent that he couldn’t go near her. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t sleep and needed a bath in order to go to sleep. A bath was prepared for him and in he went and
Post a Comment
Read more

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove
Post a Comment
Read more